Before Halloween

The costumes are already out, the mugs have pumpkins on them, and nobody has carved anything yet. This is the stretch where Halloween is mostly a drawer you haven't opened, so here's what's in it this year.

Start with the thing a five or six year old actually has to wear: a blue fox jumpsuit filed under carnival costume rather than Halloween, which tells you it's built for more than one night out trick or treating.

For the adults, there's the mug shelf. A white Starbucks mug with a pumpkin window and a cat is the kind of seasonal object that exists mainly to be filled with something warm and photographed badly in bad light.

Its cousin, a white and black Starbucks mug shaped like a cat, goes further by abandoning the mug shape almost entirely in favor of the cat shape, which is either a design risk or the whole point.

Less ambiguous is the Snoopy pumpkin tumbler, a Peanuts crossover that keeps the embossing literal: pumpkins, engraved, on a tumbler, for autumn, no further interpretation required.

For the house itself, a 13.5 inch animated Disney Halloween house with lights and music does the work a jack-o'-lantern used to do alone, assuming you have an outlet near the porch.

And for whoever in the house collects small plastic people, a blind-pick Lego Halloween minifigure from the Q4 2024 series rewards patience or guesswork, depending on how you feel about not knowing which one you're getting until it's open.